General Urban Kitchener Updates and Rumours

[neonjoe]

But it's a bit of a challenge. Victoria South is not as bad because it has a lot of single family homes facing it. It feels alright to walk down, if not a bit noisy in parts. South then turns into a 2 lane road at around Victoria/Walnut. But North is an arterial road connecting Highway 7 and it sees a lot of traffic from people going to and from Guelph. Weber and Lancaster also intersect with it, so essentially it's 3 heavily used arterial roads in one area with a lot of traffic converging. It would be nice if it could be reduced to two lanes with bike infrastructure and wider sidewalks for pedestrians, but with that amount of traffic, I'm not sure how much they could change without a long term attempt to reduce car dependency or appropriating some of the property on the businesses that face the road in order to add in bike lanes and wider sidewalks.

It’s not that hard to get a significant volume of traffic off Victoria: Re-arrange the intersection with Shirley Drive to make the superior straight-through route be Shirley Drive — bridge over Grand River with the leg of Victoria coming under the railway bridge be the inferior route that ends at the superior route. Similarly re-arrange the intersection of Shirley Drive with Bingeman’s Centre Drive. That gives traffic from out of town a direct route to the expressway on a purpose-built high capacity road (not street). Let Victoria St. be an actual street in the urban planning sense.

Build the access road under the tracks connecting Wellington with Edna south of Victoria, and close the Lancaster St. crossing, at least to motor vehicle traffic (should be OK to keep a multi-use trail crossing). Vehicles can cross the tracks at Margaret or at the new underpass instead of at Lancaster. This probably also fixes traffic on Lancaster south/east of Victoria and at the intersection with Krug.

This is all at least worth studying closely. Actually I’ll go further and suggest it’s definitely worth trying. I don’t trust our engineers to study it properly. There is enough evidence of excessive deference to motor vehicles in their approach that my deference to professional judgement is overridden.

When/If the new Highway 7 happens I would suspect more traffic on Victoria between Edna and Centennial will be for local businesses rather than commuters.